WINNER OF THE 2023/2024 LIVE CANON PAMPHLET COMPETITION

Deborah Finding is a queer feminist writer with a background in academia and activism. Her debut poetry pamphlet, ‘vigils for dead and dying girls’ was published with Nine Pens in 2023. This pamphlet, her second, won the Live Canon 2023/2024 pamphlet prize. Other poetry publications include fourteen poems, Propel, berlin lit, Anthropocene, Poetry Wales’ ‘How I Write a Poem’ series, The Alchemy Spoon, iamb and The Friday Poem. She has also been widely anthologised, and has written features and interviews for The Guardian, the Huffington Post and DIVA magazine.. Deborah won the Write By The Sea poetry prize and the Indigo Dreams Spring Poetry Prize, and has been placed, shortlisted or commended for the Troubadour, Live Canon, Hexham, Hammond House, Goldsmith, Oxford Poetry Library, and Ver Poets prizes. Originally from the North East of England, Deborah now lives and works in London, where she is also the inaugural poet in residence at the Soho Poly Theatre.

Amortisation charts a queer love in all its messy glory, from first flush to heartbreak. In it, Deborah Finding writes poems that are often funny, sometimes sad, but always moving; poems that, despite their personal nature, we can all somehow recognise ourselves in. While it may chart a slowly depreciating relationship, Amortisation never gives up on the power and hope of connection. The poems sing with bright, fresh images that celebrate love, even when it hurts. - Ben Townley-Canning

The first delight of Amortisation is the wide ambit from which it draws its sentimental vocabularies: cartography, technology, accounting, commerce, formal logic and therapeutic practice are all raided for their metaphorical possibilities, and this makes for poems filled with canny, funny and self-deprecating flourishes. Its quieter enjoyments lie in its ambivalent relationship to risk and sensuality: these are poems that know about wood and kindling and firelighters and whisky, and about the pleasures and dangers involved in serious, sensuous play. - Abigail Parry

The voices of Deborah Finding’s work are so blazingly here and now: vivid, restless, they cry out over haunting soundtracks and fleeting urban glimpses. It’s a poetry bristling with hope and sex and scorn, but joy is never far away in all its forms and colours. Amortisation is to be deeply relished. - Glyn Maxwell

Evidence that dating a poet is an extreme sport. - Caroline Bird